FAIR associate Sam Husseini has blogged his reaction (Husseini.org, 7/4/09) to a Barack “Obama Photo Op with Helen Thomas” in which the president “came with cupcakes to wish Helen Thomas a happy birthday”: “Now, if only he’d take her questions.” Obama claimed they have a “common birthday wish”–for a “real healthcare reform bill”–but Thomas is not in favor of Obama’s plan, she’s for single-payer. Last week I bumped into Helen Thomas at her stomping ground, Mama Ayesha’s restaurant in Washington, D.C., and she stressed the single-payer failure on the part of Obama. I asked her if I was right, that […]

Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/25/09) thinks that “there is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell,” and as proof offers “Powell’s disingenuous response” to Bob Schieffer’s May 24 CBS Face the Nation “question about the ex-secretary of state’s knowledge regarding ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ which the International Committee of the Red Cross and virtually all other objective observers say constituted torture”: Powell–whom, Parry recalls, “was a member of President George W. Bush’s Principals Committee, which oversaw the interrogation policies”–claimed to an unchallenging Schieffer, “to have been kept mostly out of the loop…. He […]